Already competitive with subsidies in many places, already competitive in several places without subsidies, Especially to natural gas, wind energy will be competitive world-wide with gas, oil and coal in five years. Bloomberg New Energy Finance issued a statement on November 10 with this news. Wind energy will drop 12% in the next five years allowing it to become cost competitive with natural gas.
The best wind farms in the world already produce energy equal to or less than the cost of coal. In 1984 there were only 0.3 gigawatts of installed wind generators. By the end of 2011 there will be 240 gigawatts installed. The efficiency of wind turbines has nearly tripled over the last 27 years. Operation and maintenance costs of wind farms had decreased by 85 percent over the last 30 years. These trends will continue.
Lead analyst at Bloomberg Justin Wu tells us: “The press is reacting to the recent price drops in solar equipment as though they are the result of temporary oversupply or of a trade war. This masks what is really going on: a long-term, consistent drop in clean energy technology costs, resulting from decades of hard work by tens of thousands of researchers, engineers, technicians and people in operations and procurement. And it is not going to stop: In the next few years the mainstream world is going to wake up to wind cheaper than gas, and rooftop solar power cheaper than daytime electricity. Add in the same sort of deep long-term price drops for power storage, demand management, LED lighting and so on – and we are clearly talking about a whole new game.
Bloomberg Energy: http://bnef.com/PressReleases/view/172